Berlin Wall drives wedge through LA art community

The concrete wall that divided the city of Berlin for 28 years is suddenly splitting a segment of Los Angeles' art community just as the 20th anniversary of the wall's falling nears.

The trouble began earlier this month when the Wende Museum installed several segments of the original Berlin Wall on Wilshire Boulevard.

Kent Twitchell, whose larger-than-life paintings cover entire walls and sides of freeways, said he planned to "bookend" two sections of the wall with portraits of President John F. Kennedy, who denounced the barrier in a Berlin speech in 1961, and President Ronald Reagan, who famously demanded, "Tear down this wall!" shortly before it came down in 1989.

But as he rushed to finish the portraits, Twitchell said he was told by organizers that he could leave one of the paintings in his studio: There was no room for both.

"They said there would only be room for one and they just assumed it would be Kennedy," the disappointed artist said this week as he continued to work at putting the final touches on the Reagan one.

"It's unfortunate," Twitchell said, "because the way I work, I do a concept, plan the concept out and put it up. Now, if there's not room enough for two presidents, just one, my whole thesis of one at the beginning of the Cold War and one at the end is gone."

Justinian Jampol, whose Wende Museum and Archive of the Cold War is mounting the public exhibition along a busy, museum-lined street in the city's Miracle Mile district, said Twitchell's vision got sliced in half when some of the sections of the wall acquired from Germany came covered in historic graffiti.

Because the museum is ethically obligated to preserve that, Jampol said it had to cut the size of Twitchell's display in half to fit him in along with three other artists invited to take part.

Twitchell complained that once the project's organizers ran out of room they indicated they wanted him to show up with Kennedy, not Reagan, when he mounts his work on the 10-foot-high wall across the street from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Saturday.

But Jampol said presidential preferences never played a role.

"I would take either one," he said. "It's just really a space issue, and Kent happened to do the Kennedy one first."

Jerri Levi, who curated an exhibition of Twitchell's work at Los Angeles' Look Gallery earlier this year, complained that putting Kennedy in and leaving Reagan out is akin to censoring Twitchell's work.

"Whether that censorship was deliberate or unintentional, it's still censorship," she said.

Jampol said there's still a chance both portraits could be displayed. The delivery of two sections of the wall was delayed, and if they arrive free of historic graffiti, he said, Twitchell is welcome to use them. If not, he said he'd be amenable to placing Reagan's face over Kennedy's at some point so everyone could see it. The exhibition continues until the end of the year.